Echoes and Stars

1. Yesterday I listened to The Replacements’ Don’t Tell A Soul. Those songs changed me. I didn’t know anyone that liked that album. But I loved it and kept listening for years. About once a year I revisit that album and I’m for a short period I’m back in my ’79 Chevette cruising the Parkway trying to convince some friends how good this album is.

2. Jesus was hard on the rich and spoke graciously to the adulterous. We are the exact reverse.

3. The other night Bethany and I went out for dinner and to the bookstore. I sat in the floor and read a poem by Seamus Heaney I don’t think I’d ever read before. That night I dreamed about the poem and could see all the lines on the page. When I woke up, I could remember only a short phrase.

4. People complain about baseball games being too long as if they ever wanted them to be over.

5. Listening to The Replacements made me think of how when I saw the video for Social Distortion’s “Story of my Life” for the first time and I immediately went out and bought that album and played it till the ink on the cassette disappeared.

6. I saw on Twitter the other day where a person was recovering from surgery and having to spend a week in bed and I thought about how great that is. That’s probably not healthy, huh?

7. When it comes to writing, it is not enough to have something to say. Your subject matter is no justification for writing about it with poverty of ability.

8. An enormous section of our Scriptures are poetry. An enormous section of our Christian bookstores are crappy knick-knacks.

9. “A nine-to-five man who has seen poetry.”

10. My wife made roast beef sandwiches with a blue cheese mousse as part of the birthday week and this one of the many reasons I never wonder why I married her.

11. We were there when Oscar Taveras debuted and hit that majestic homer that opened the clouds and signaled a bright future and the hope of so much more. So devavstating for all that hope to now give way to “what might have been.”